#2228 Gozag, the Greedy (god of gold)
Gozag Ym Sagoz, the Greedy
"Gozag Ym Sagoz, the Greedy, believes that the world belongs to the rich. Those who accept this decree will perform noticeably better when they see gold glint around them. Followers cannot earn piety in any traditional way, the only way to impress this deity is by amassing a fortune. For Gozag Ym Sagoz, both flesh and food are inferior to wealth, and therefore all corpses are turned into gold piles. Stalwarts can order immediate help in form of potions on sale, the prices being dictated by the Greedy. Particularly well off adherers can invoke their god to attract shopkeepers into the dungeon, and even to bribe whole branches. The Greedy hates it when followers change level without first having collected all the gold they can."
Piety:
There is no piety under Gozag but powers cost gold.
No skill is related to Gozag powers.
Upon entering service, a fee must be payed. [0]
Passive effects:
* Any corpses from player (or ally) kills are turned into gold piles. [1]
* All piles containing gold are coloured yellow (the top item).
* Monsters carrying picked-up gold are coloured yellow.
* Indicate presence of gold, both LOS and for seen on level. [2]
* When in sight of n gold piles, increase all skills by n (bezond 27).
Conduct:
Penance for deliberately leaving a level containing known gold (either on ground or in the possession of a marked monster):
* take away the amount of money you missed, both on the ground and from the player ("Take care of the pennies!")
* increase the number of Potion and Call Shop ability uses by one (this makes them more expensive)
To get out of penance, have to collect an amount of m*100+3d100 where m is the number of previous misbehaviours.
Abilities:
* Potion Petition. [3]
Presents three lists of up to five potions effects, with prices. Choosing one causes all effects to occur in a single turn.
* Call Merchant. [4]
Choice between three shops. New shopkeepers can only go into untouched levels of branches which can feature shops.
* Bribe Branch. [5]
Money spends for a branch is used to make monsters either ignore the player completely or make them followers. In both cases, try to bribe the better monsters (e.g. orc warlords rather than plain orcs). Followers are permanent and level up but need pay from time to time.
Retribution:
Only occurs if abandoning the god or if running out of money to pay some fine (the latter is rare). Retribution does not time out; it goes down when the following effects occur:
* Curse of Gozag: if the player is about to pick up a consumable item, it turns into gold (a nominal sum only). Items of low value are exempt. Use special messages for food items, potions etc.
* Gold to stone: a level with lots of gold (some branch ends or vaults) may be chosen (when entering it). If so, replace each gold pile on the level by a single stone. (This is more or less flavour only.)
* Surround player by eight mimics mimicking gold.
* Gozag pays monster (of the bribable types) in your LOS, making them fight better. (Random good effects like swiftness, rage, etc.)
Titles:
Profligate (penance)
Pauper (<100)
Materlialist (<1000)
Vendee (<5000)
Mogul/Magnate/Tycoon (5000 or more gold carried)
[0] Fee to enter service:
Count the total amount C of gold of all levels visited (whether the gold was seen/detected or not). The fee to be paid when entering service is
fee = 300 + (1 - 1/log(C+10))/2 * C [logarithm with base 10]
If too much: "The Greedy does not accept service from beggars like you."
[1] Corpses to gold:
Use weight (or size), with small monsters (rats) giving 1d3 gold, up to huge monsters like dragons giving around 100 gold. Randomise amounts.
[2] Gold indicator:
Piles containing gold get an elemental colour (i.e. the topmost item does), e.g. yellow+orange, making it "flacker". Alternatively, or in addition, such piles could get a 3x3 halo-like effect. Display $$$$ in the 'Pray' part of the status area if gold has been seen on the level but not yet picked up.
[3] Potion Petition:
Randomly generates three sequences of up to five potions. Each sequence has a price which is determined by the prices of the good potion effects and the presence/absence of bad potions. There is a fourth sequence containing just a water potion with a high price. Example:
a) 240$ - might, healing, poison, healing, decay
b) 320$ - speed, healing
c) 550$ - degeneration, cure mutation
d) 500$ - water
Upon choosing a sequence, all effects are carried out in a single turn. Mummies cannot use this ability. With ongoing usage, prices increase slowly.
How to create the potion lists: use hard-coded interesting pairs/triples with predefined values. When rolling a sequence, use a pair, a triple, two pairs or pair+triple. Have a list of potions than can be appended to the list (including paralysis, slowing, strong poison). Examples:
200: mutation, mutation
200: degeneration, decay, speed
500: magic, cure mutation
1000: heal wounds, heal wounds, heal wounds
[4] Call Merchant:
Example:
a) 5050$ - Arutovi's Delicatessen
b) 12770$ - Rumi's Antique Book Store
c) 2820$ - Grajor's General Shop
After paying: "Rumi sets up her new shop in the Shoals."
The price depends on the number of shopkeepers already called, the type of shop, the total value of stock and whether it is antique (but not depth). And reversely: since the shops have to be affordable to the player, the amount of carried gold affects these parameters. Note the bought but not yet visited shops in Ctrl-O.
[5] Bribe Branch:
Each branch (except Dungeon and branches only inhabited by stupid monsters) has a "branch bribe score". Using this ability in a branch adds 3000 gold to the score of the player's current branch.
For branches with a positive score:
- Monsters may either ignore the player fully (allowing to walk past
them, switch places, use autotravel) or become followers (allies).
- When entering a level of a bribed branch, immediately choose and mark
bribed monsters. Bribed monsters are awake. For each type of bribable
monster, chances for being bribed are highest for the top end of the
hierarchy.
- Each monster ignoring the player reduces the branch bribe score.
Same for monsters following the player, with stronger reduction.
- Monster which ignore the player will also ignore anyone else: they
swap positions with any other monster who wants to do.
- Followers demand payment from time to time.
Not paying them makes them ignore the player and leave the dungeon.
- Monsters stemming from a branch with positive score can be affected
outside their branch (e.g. orcs in the dungeon).
- If a band is generated, all or none band members are affected.
- The score slowly reduces over time. If the score is zero again, make
all monsters become hostile again, except for the (paid) followers.
Bribe targets: Orc (orcs), Elf (elves), Snake (nagas), Shoals (merfolk),
Vaults (humans), Zot (draconians), hells (appropriate demons).
The branch scores are visible in the ^! screen in a qualitative manner:
Elves: lightly bribed.
Draconians: strongly bribed.
(The adjectives refer to the chance that a top-tier monster of that
genus will be affected.)
Attacking bribed monsters:
- If attacking a bribed monster, the monster becomes hostile again.
Also, all ignoring-bribed, nearby monsters become hostile.
Followers just demand more pay next time.
- The score for that branch is reduced.
- Prompt before attacking bribed monsters.
Conceived in collaboration with Hammerbroish from SA. The god has some implications on tactics and strategy which I did not write down for length of FR reasons. Feedback is welcome, as usual.
I think pure 'gold' god is a bit bland and limiting when it comes to abilities. God of acquirement. If you expanded it to 'God of Wealth', you could add interesting powers like 'duplicate item'. This way, you could enable the player to get very good items from the god, but he'd have to find it first.
b0rsuk
"bribe monsters to kill"...
How about a bounty instead ? You could set a bounty on the monster's head, it would cause your followers to race to the monster (killing everything in their way) because only the first gets the reward. As soon as the monster is dead, your followers slow down. I like this version more.
b0rsuk
I like the bounty idea that b0rsuk suggested, but what if the winner of the bounty gains an xp bonus, and the effect of the buffs depends on the bounty set.
Also, do you really want corpses to gold to be passive? I think that eliminating the most available food source in the game would become a big hassle, though I suppose you could always buy food shops. It seems like it would be more appropriate that he turn monsters into gold if you pray and butcher them. Otherwise you just have a bunch of mummies who don't want to be offset by hunger, but who can't benefit from the potions.
Okay, it seems as if some comments are necessary. By dpeg, not logged in.
The god comes with two tactical and three strategic options, and an additional conduct.
Tactical 1: you perform better when gold is around (something like skill+5 should already make a noticeable impact). The corpses-to-gold rule helps here. It should make for more interesting tactical situations: with this, corridor is not always better than open space (especially for casters).
Tactical 2: The potion power. Potions have been used here (instead of other or more types of consumables) because they are self-focused and mostly short-term oriented (as opposed to wands or scrolls, say).
Strategic 1: getting more shops. This amounts to having access to more items (which is huge), and also to items without needing to do branch ends. It is balanced by the lack of space (levels to put the shops) and money. Note that having more items to look at is not the same as a string of acquirements.
Strategic 2: easier branch ends. By bribing a branch, you can attack it earlier and with less risk (i.e. less use of resources).
In Zot, you can (partially) offset the threat of draconian packs.
Strategic 3: You can acquire followers which will level and be permanent. On the other hand, you will have to pay them all the time, so it is quite different to other forms of ally play.
The total balance will be so that you cannot do that all at once. This leads to choices, which hopefully are interesting.
The god also comes with a conduct (apart from the obvious one):
no corpses to eat. This is intended (so No to the prayer idea). It does mean that Sp and Vp have a better time with the god, and Tr, Og, Ce a harder one -- that is okay. (Mummies are different: the god lends itself to scumming, so is adapted to Mummies. But they lose on the potion power, of course. This is also intended.)
b0rsuk: I do not see how duplicating items (think of scrolls of EA/EW/recharging) is more interesting than buying for shops. The bounty idea has some merits, but the Bribe Branch idea tries to take the bribe staple (which comes up in every money god proposal) and give it a large scale twist: it is easier on the interface and does exactly what the player wants (minor orcs are not affected, so you can kill them; the tough ones are bribed). Also, it is not really about 'bribe to kill'. First, it is 'bribe to ignore'. After that, it is 'keep paying to kill'.
This god is a parable on how money works (and always did): if you pay enough, most will gladly look away when you slay their neighbours. If you add some more, they will even slay the neighbour themself.
nobody: I don't know what you mean by 'big hassle'. No corpses is a very clear prospect, so you can prepare and adapt to it. Yes, going for food shop is one solution (which needs a bit of planning, with space and gold). Another is to be faster. Still another is to pay for potions, going for porridge (which will be costly, too, as porridge is rare).
By Andy:
Not to mention that you will need the gold from transformed corpses if summoning a single shop can be well over 12,000 pieces of gold!
I was skeptical at first but Dpeg's comment makes the gameplay implications much clearer. I like it.
Lemuel
I will opt to leave the actual feature-based comments to others, but my comment is that crawl doesn't need any more gods named things like "Gozag Ym Sagoz". :)
freakingretard: I'd love to hear your comments! And I am used to trashing, just say something :)
On the name: the last two new gods got simple names (Beogh and Lugonu). There were complains that traditional Crawl-style names like Yrdy and Kiku are not used anymore. Since working titles stick so well, we came up with a funny name this time.
I'm glad to see my gold god proposal return (cf FR 2117651). This one looks very good. I checked back my FR, there is nothing I miss.
Except maybe this ability :
Throw coin : One or several coins are enchanted and thrown at a monster for
damage.
maskounet: nothing gets lost over here :)
Another tactical usage of gold (plain damage) could be used. Just three remarks: It could go a bit against how the gold god likes to see gold put to use (buy/bribe). There is some overlap with the Reverse Alchemy spell FR. Finally, different approaches could be used (in Germany, there is a tale called "Sterntaler" ('star coins' or 'heavenly coins')) -- an area effect with gold raining down, doing lots of damage, melting in the process.
dpeg
While the idea of using gold as a weapon directly (either by throwing gold coins or having them rain from the heavens) fits thematically, I think it actually works out a bit blandly gameplay-wise. If it's a throwing weapon, then we just have another Minor Destruction (or other spammable line-of-sight spell as a god ability) with a slightly different cost than MP/Piety. Also, I feel that it's a bit too common... There are all kinds of games out there where you can throw coins as an attack (RPGs, especially, but I seem to recall it elsewhere). If we included Throw Money as an extra ability, then it would be a bland addition that I wouldn't mind but I wouldn't be excited about. If it replaces something else, though, I would be disappointed, since the other proposed effects all excite me. I can't wait to step into the orc mines, petition for hopefully berserk or haste, and then go savage with +5 or so to all of my trained skills (because of all the gold in sight) and just generally get in over my head (and laugh all the way).
And as a bit of a footnote, this god idea initially started as a god of stealth/stabbing, but all of the personality aspects had more to do with money, and the mechanics were (in retrospect) bland.
'Throw Coin' looks like a blatant ADOM ripoff. For unitiated, shopkeepers in ADOM throw coins when angry. I think it's a lame attempt at humor.
If anything, there could be a prototype gnomish weapon which shoots coins. Coins tend to be of uniform size, shape and weight and - in theory - could make decent and plentiful ammo. But
0) It's still lame
1) it fits more into misc item category
b0rsuk
This is a genuinely interesting idea for a new god. It definitely seems that it would lend itself to scumming, as said before, but that's easily countered by the corpse to gold effect, making it hard to maintain scumming and requiring you to continue moving if you don't want to starve to death.
However, you do, of course, have a choice to call up a food shop, if that appears in the list you call for, or hope for a potion of porridge when you call up a potion list, and have to suffer through the sequence.
In my opinion, for the god to be balanced with all the implications for scumming, the corpse to gold effect should stay as it is.
Being able to bribe Zot sounds a little overpowered to me, however, but they do have a conduct restriction within Zot that can be dangerous (have to kill monsters marked as having gold).
If you bribe a monster that has gold, he should be unmarked, so that you can advance without having to kill him.
And also, the gold pickup before leaving level should be lifted only on the case of going upwards, with the exception of branch ends -after- picking up the rune, (or in the case of no-rune branches, somewhere around ~70% exploration), and picking up the orb of Zot.
Truly an interesting suggestion, though.
Made a new FR with this proposal, so closing this one.